Friday, September 12

Tom Clark - Edward Dorn (1929-1999)

Stripped bare by drought and grasshoppers. Grant County, North Dakota: July 1936
"... Ed was born and grew up in Eastern Illinois, on the banks of the river Embarrass (a tributary of the Wabash). He never knew his father. His mother was of French-Canadian ancestry, his maternal grandfather a half-Indian Quebecois railroad man ('master pipefitter in the age of steam'). He attended a one-room school, and while in high school played billiards with the local undertaker for a dime a point. 'Brought up off and on during / the intensity of depression nomadism,' he followed the wandering work-searches of his several 'exodus relatives' down 'bleak grit avenues' of a childhood whose anxious, difficult instruction, though he was always shy of speaking of it, never ceased to underlie and complicate the moral and historical vision of his work."Jacket# NineTom Clark - Edward Dorn: On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck